In short, a press that should on principle raven for every piece of information that might be damning to the powerful of every stripe—a press that has shown itself willing to publish anonymous anti-Trump leaks that sometimes turned out to be false—has made it clear that they do not want you to know what they do not want to know themselves.

The truth is both the memo itself and the press’s unforgivable lack of curiosity and outrage about the memo are part of a much bigger scandal that has gone further to damage our republic than anything Trump has done or said. The memo represents just one more jigsaw piece in a picture of the Obama administration as a Chicago-style Democratic machine rife with cronyism and abuse of power, a machine to which the media closed its eyes.

We know this. It’s not conjecture. We know that Obama’s IRS made successful efforts to silence conservative voices during the president’s reelection campaign. After a settlement agreement in Z Street’s lawsuit against them, we know that the IRS also targeted Jewish groups that supported Israel. We know that Obama appointed one attorney general who styled himself the president’s “wing-man … there with my boy” (imagine Jeff Sessions saying that), and another who held a secret meeting with Bill Clinton while Hillary Clinton was under investigation. And now we begin to learn that the Obama Justice Department may have colluded with a Democrat’s campaign to spy on a Republican’s. Obama misled us about much of this and more: about the IRS; about when he himself gained knowledge of Hillary’s secret email server, a server he used under a pseudonym; about his secret dealings with Iran; and about the effects of his signature health-care bill.

All this—really a steady stream of deceptions and abuses of power—while journalists kowtowed to, flattered, and ultimately raved about the administration being “scandal-free.” The press sacrificed its credibility with eight years of willful blindness. Those who asked with the ancient Roman poet Juvenal, “Who will guard the guardians?” were answered by the self-styled heroes of journalistic truth-telling: “Not us.”

Jonathan Karl of ABC asked, and I kid you not, “Can you explain to me how a guy that eats McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken and all those Diet Cokes, and who never exercises, is in as good of shape as you say he’s in?” Jackson, confirming what everyone in the world who eats right and exercises daily and still struggles to keep his weight down already knows, answered: “It’s called genetics.”

The last thing Democrats want is for Trump to solve any of the problems he was elected to address. The 2017 elections in Virginia and Alabama are Democrats’ blueprint for 2018, which is to increase Democratic voter intensity while capitalizing on Republican malaise. This is a recipe for a Democratic tidal wave.

In 2012, Mr. Lee left Hong Kong and returned to the United States to live with his family in Virginia. F.B.I. agents investigating him searched his luggage during a pair of hotel stays in Hawaii and Virginia, and found two small books with handwritten notes that contained classified information. It is unclear why Mr. Lee decided to risk arrest by coming to the United States this month.

In the books, Mr. Lee had written down details about meetings between C.I.A. informants and undercover agents, as well as their real names and phone numbers, according to court papers. Prosecutors said that material in the books reflected the same information contained in classified cables that Mr. Lee had written while at the agency.

A group of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau employees have taken to calling themselves “Dumbledore’s Army” as they rebel against Donald Trump and Mick Mulvaney. Robert Tracinsky explains that they’re really Dolores Umbridge:

Beyond that, it strikes me that the political left keeps getting these children’s allegories wrong. They borrow elements from Harry Potter or from the Star Wars series and remake them as the whole basis of their political identity—no, seriously, this is why the Left calls its opposition to the Trump administration “the Resistance,” which is taken from the most recent Star Wars movie. But they’re borrowing symbols of rebellion against overbearing authority—and using them in defense of overbearing authority.

Later:

The fact that these symbols—the rebels from Star Wars, the Harry Potter heroes—were created by people who would describe themselves as modern “liberals” just adds to the contradiction. It’s like all the people who flocked to the Hunger Games novels and movies, then complained that the Electoral College gives the Districts too much power to resist the edicts of the Capitol. They like to play around with symbols of the heroic fight for freedom and of individualistic resistance against authority, then turn around and impose rigid codes of conformity and demand a big, intrusive government staffed by exactly the kind of power-hungry bureaucrats they just told us they were against.

During the 2017 presidential campaign, a high-level Department of Justice official, Bruce Ohr, met repeatedly with the author of the Trump dossier, Christopher Steele. After the election Ohr met with Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS, the company that paid Steele to assemble the dossier. This was only just discovered despite several subpoenas from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that should have uncovered this information.

Silo was the SDF spokesman and one of the officials who told the media in mid-October – when the deal was reached – that fewer than 300 fighters left Raqqa with their families while others would fight on.

However, he told Reuters in an interview that the number of fighters who were allowed to go was far higher and the account of a last-ditch battle was a fiction designed to keep journalists away while the evacuation took place.

He said a U.S. official in the international coalition against Islamic State, whom he did not identify, approved the deal at a meeting with an SDF commander.

In the strictly scientific sense, the Communist “experiment” didn’t fail. It produced a clear result. It took basic ideas about morality and politics and tested what happens when they are implemented with ruthless consistency. It tested them in one country after another, in different cultures and under different conditions, and it produced the same result every time.

Here is what we learned, or at least what we should have learned. We learned that a system based on attempting to eliminate self-interest doesn’t lead to happiness. It leads to everyone being equally miserable. When you demand that people sacrifice their well-being and happiness, how could they end up any other way? Communism is based on the logic of “the beatings will continue until morale improves.” It tries to build collective happiness on the foundation of individual suffering.

Later:

That leads us to another big lesson of Communism: without individualism, there is no basis for individual rights or any other guarantee of human dignity. The big mistake people make about Communism is to think that it’s just about collectivizing property. It’s actually about collectivizing people. Communist countries impose oppressive systems of censorship and interfere deeply with the personal lives of their subjects precisely because they take seriously this idea of the subordination of the individual to the collective good. They apply it to everything, including the very thoughts in your head, which they also treat as public property.

The SAAR network is a web of over 100 purported charities, nonprofits, and financial firms, centered in northern Virginia, that were accused of laundering money for terrorism. The SAAR Foundation, the nucleus of the network, was set up in 1983 under the patronage of Sulaiman Abdul Aziz al-Rajhi, a wealthy Saudi banking magnate who is strongly suspected of supporting al-Qaeda. The foundation was dissolved in 2000 after coming under U.S. terror scrutiny. Though federal agents uncovered staggering amounts of evidence against members of the SAAR network, political interference led to the case being dropped. As a consequence, entities within the SAAR network have been free to continue their activities and even influence American elections. The American public deserves a chance to see the evidence against SAAR figures and to break up their cozy political alliances with favor-seeking politicians.

For decades, the Left has advanced its agenda by using the courts to effectively amend the Constitution without going through the amendment process. Want a constitutional right to abortion? Harry Blackmun will oblige. But there is a Jacksonian version of that: amending the Constitution through obstinacy and demagoguery. In the matter of creating a categorical exemption from prosecution in certain immigration cases, the Obama administration took an action that President Obama himself had earlier argued was beyond the legal power of the president. Donald Trump had insisted that the Obama administration required congressional authorization before making war on Syria, but he quickly reversed himself once the power was his. Those issues remain unresolved: An injunction was issued against the Obama administration’s expanded amnesty, and a 4–4 Supreme Court decision denied the administration a rehearing of the case. The Trump administration’s actions in Syria have not been litigated at all.

The only thing about any of this that seems to me obvious is that our tripartite government is a tricycle with a wonky wheel — the presidency. Though there are ancient intellectual disputes about such questions as judicial review, a reasonably effective and stable modus vivendi has evolved for relations between the judicial and legislative branches. And there was, until fairly recently, a reasonably effective (though less stable) settlement between the presidency and the other branches. Congress expanded the executive branch, for instance with the creation of the Department of Education, and it constrained the executive branch, too, through legislation such as the War Powers Resolution and the Hatch Act. But the presidency is an opportunistic political organism, and it has grown, for good reasons and bad, particularly during the administrations of Richard Nixon and those who came after. Claims of executive privilege grew to such an extent as to amount to something like immunity from congressional oversight, particularly in matters related to political scandals. The role of the president as “Commander-in-Chief” was inflated to princely proportions. And now, President Trump wants a bigger presidency, too.

In order to understand why more violence might be coming, it is essential to understand that left-wing mobs are almost never stopped, arrested, or punished. Colleges do nothing to stop them, and civil authorities do nothing to stop them on campuses or anywhere else. Police are reduced to spectators as they watch left-wing gangs loot stores, smash business and car windows, and even take over state capitols (as in Madison, Wisc.).

It’s beginning to dawn on many Americans that some mayors, police chiefs, and college presidents have no interest in stopping this violence. Left-wing officials sympathize with the lawbreakers; and the police, who rarely sympathize with thugs of any ideology, are ordered to do nothing by emasculated police chiefs. Consequently, given the abdication by all these authorities of their role to protect the public, some members of the public will inevitably decide that they will protect themselves and others.

Later:

So, here’s a prediction: If college presidents, mayors, and police chiefs won’t stop left-wing mobs, other Americans will. I hope this doesn’t happen, because electing conservative Republicans and not donating money to colleges would be more effective. But it is almost inevitable.

Then the left-wing media – the mainstream media – will enter hysteria mode with reports that “right-wing fascists” are violently attacking America.

And that’s when mayors and college presidents will finally order in the police.